Joel Goldman - Shakedown

Troy woke me just before six. We set up shop in a large conference room. One wall was lined with dry-erase boards, another housed?at-screen monitors linked to network, cable, and satellite feeds when they weren’t being used for in-house presentations or video conferences. Modular tables were laid out around the perimeter in a rectangular donut.

We were working with limited information since the preliminary forensics reports weren’t back. Troy posted the names of the victims on one of the dry-erase boards, adding names of their known associates, competitors, and enemies to the rapidly expanding universe of people to be tracked down, interviewed, and ruled in or out as suspects. I thought again about Troy’s speculation that Jalise Williams may have been the real target. We’d have to dig into the lives of all the victims to be certain of anything.

Ammara Iverson sketched a rough schematic of the neighborhood on another board, noting the houses they’d been to in the search for witnesses and the ones that warranted a second visit. Lani Haywood and Jim Day were studying the surveillance videotape, isolating freeze frames of people for whom we would need names and alibis.

I took a moment from studying the crime scene photographs to watch them work. They did their jobs with unhurried efficiency, making certain they didn’t miss anything. I waited until I made eye contact with each of them, offering a half smile and tilt of my head to reassure them I was okay and in charge.

I played with my pen beneath the table, hands shaking, testing my condition by repeatedly putting the cap on and then taking it off. I thought that if I could master the pen, I could get through the day. So far, the pen was winning.

“Ammara, what did you get from the neighbors?” I asked.

She finished her drawing, gathered her notes, and gave me a straight-ahead look. She was lean and muscular, a tribute to her days playing college volleyball, tall enough to rise above the net, strong enough to spike the ball right through the opposition. She wore her hair tightly cut, almost buzzed, against her brown skin, her jeans and T-shirt hanging on her lean frame with a casual elegance.

“Big surprise. No one saw or heard anything. They might even be telling the truth. It was raining pretty hard. Lots of thunder and lightning. Plus it was the middle of the night. No reason to be looking out their windows.”

“Did you talk to the people who lived on either side and behind Marcellus?”

She turned to the drawing of Marcellus’s block and the one immediately behind his to the west.

“LaDonna Simpson lives by herself on the south side. She’ll be eighty-one tomorrow. Goes to bed at eight o’clock. Slept through everything, which makes sense since she’s mostly deaf. Only reason she answered the door was that she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom when we came knocking. Wayne Miller has the house on the north side. He wasn’t home.”

“Where was he?”

“In jail. Bad checks. His girlfriend is staying there. Her name is Tarla Hicks. She was out partying. Came home after the shooting was over. Girl was so high I don’t know how she found her way home.”

“What about the house that backs up to Marcellus? The lights were on when I was in the backyard.”

“Belongs to Latrell Kelly. Works at the railroad terminal in Argentine. Said everyone in the neighborhood knew what Marcellus was about. Said he stayed out of Marcellus’s business and never had any trouble with him. Said the storm woke him but he didn’t get out of bed until he heard the sirens. Guy’s no help.”

“Did you check him out?”

“Yeah. Port Authority confirms his employment. Supervisor says he’s quiet, does his job, shows up on time. No problems. No arrests, no convictions. A couple of traffic tickets. That’s it.”

“Dig deeper on him. I don’t want to wake up one day and see his neighbors on television saying how he always seemed so quiet before he started killing everybody in sight. And expand the canvass to cover a block in every direction from Marcellus’s house. Put together profiles of the residents. We may not find an eyewitness, but we might find someone who has heard something since the shootings that could help us. And see what you can find out about Jalise Williams. Was she cheating on Marcellus? Did someone wish she was?”

“I’m on it,” Ammara said.

“Okay, people,” I said. “What do we got?”

“Five dead and nothing else,” Troy answered.

“Nothing else is right. It’s daylight and we’re falling behind. Keep digging.”

Colby Hudson appeared in the doorway of the conference room at seven o’clock, his beleaguered appearance stopping everyone. He looked like he’d spent the night in the rain, his long hair matted and tangled, shirt clinging to his body, the bottom of his jeans streaked with mud. He was thirty-three but his pale complexion, red-rimmed eyes, and worn appearance made him look five years older, the price of working undercover.

That made him seven years older than my daughter Wendy in human years and at least eleven years older in FBI years. Either way, the age difference made me nervous, though that wasn’t the only thing that bothered me about their relationship. Colby delivered great intelligence that had led to a number of important arrests. That didn’t make him right for my daughter. Not because there was no one good enough for Wendy, though I had my doubts. It was because he liked undercover work too much. Living on the edge, pretending to be someone and something he wasn’t for as long as he had, can make it hard for a man to remember who he really is, or worse, the myth becomes the reality.

Working undercover didn’t mean that Colby lived with the drug dealers we investigated. Every contact he had was supposed to be monitored by a backup team. Every operation was tightly regulated. There was no freelancing. Most of the time, that worked. Agents could play the role and leave it behind when they went home at night. A few forgot the difference, forgot who they were.

I may have felt differently about their relationship if Colby was working undercover on something other than drugs. Wendy had started smoking dope when she was a freshman in high school, graduating to cocaine and pills by her senior year before we put her in a program. She got clean, relapsed, and was arrested twice for possession. The second program stuck and she’d stayed sober ever since. Dating Colby put her too close to her old life.

I’d made the mistake of telling Wendy of my concerns. She told me she was cured. I told her there was no cure. She said that I needed to let go. Then she told Colby what I had said and the temperature between Colby and me turned cold and stayed that way.

“That a new outfit?” Lani Haywood asked him.

Lani was a fifteen-year veteran, just tall enough to qualify for the Bureau but more than tough enough to stay. She had matured from sleek and fast to middleweight and steadfast, her senses of fashion and humor still intact.

“Business casual,” Colby answered.

He dropped his lanky frame in a chair opposite me, swiveling it around and straddling it, arms draped over the back, fingers nervously tapping the upholstery. He had the same no-sleep aura the rest of us did, only he was that way all the time. The rest of us only got the dead man’s glow when five people were murdered in the middle of the night.

“You look like you haven’t been home in a while,” I said, calmly laying the pen and cap side by side on the table. I put my hands in my lap, hoping they’d stay there. He had his own place but spent as many nights as he could at Wendy’s. I didn’t like it, not because I was a prude, but because it would be too easy for the people he dealt with to track him back to Wendy. I had raised that issue with Wendy as well, getting the phone slammed in my ear for my efforts. He turned away for an instant, making a crooked smile, not taking the bait.